This page includes information about the aims and scope of Immunity & Ageing, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

Aims & scope

'Ageing seems to be the only available way to live a long life.' Daniel Auber

Immunity & Ageing publishes articles on all aspects of ageing examined from an immunological point of view.

Immunity & Ageing is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that considers manuscripts on all aspects of ageing examined from an immunological point of view.

During the past century, mankind has gained more years of average life expectancy than in the last 10,000 years. More than 20% of the Western population is over 60 years of age, and the proportion of those over 85 is growing six times faster than the population as a whole. Over the last few years, journals oriented towards gerontology and geriatric sciences have been accepting an increasing number of articles dealing with the immunology of ageing, but Immunity & Ageing is a journal specialising in this growing field.

Open access

All articles published by Immunity & Ageing are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

Authors of articles published in Immunity & Ageing are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement.

For authors who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BioMed Central can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. Immunity & Ageing therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1240/$1940/€1580 for each article accepted for publication. If the submitting author's institution is a Member, the cost of the article-processing charge is covered by the membership, and no further charge is payable. In the case of authors whose institutions are Supporter Members, however, a discounted article-processing charge is payable by the author.
We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. For other countries, article-processing charge waivers or discounts are granted on a case-by-case basis to authors with insufficient funds. Authors can request a waiver or discount during the submission process. For further details, see our article-processing charge page.

Indexing services

All articles published in Immunity & Ageing are included in PubMed, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service, which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Other bibliographic databases that index articles published in Immunity & Ageing include:

Biological Abstracts

BIOSIS

CAS

Citebase

DOAJ

Embase

Google Scholar

Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition

OAIster

PubMed

PubMed Central

Science Citation Index Expanded

SCImago

Scopus

SOCOLAR

Zetoc

The full text of all research articles is deposited in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and other digital archives including e-Depot (The Netherlands).

The full text of all research articles published by BioMed Central is also available on SpringerLink.

Publication and peer review process

Criteria for Publication

Immunity & Ageing considers the following types of articles:

Research: reports of data from original research.

Commentaries: short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board.

Debate articles: present an argument that is not essentially based on practical research. Debate articles can report on all aspects of the subject including sociological and ethical aspects.

Hypotheses: short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence.

Methodology articles: present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available.

Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders, invited by the Editorial Board.

Short reports: describe proposed or ongoing research, providing a detailed account of the hypothesis, rationale, and methodology of the study.

Peer-review policies

Manuscripts submitted to Immunity & Ageing will be assigned to the appropriate Section Editor by the Managing Editor. The Section Editor will oversee peer review of the manuscript. First, s/he will invite two external referees to review the manuscript. Based on the referees' comments s/he will then advise the Editor-in-Chief (or Deputy Editor) to reject the manuscript, request revisions to the manuscript according to the referees´ suggestions, or accept the manuscript without revision. The Section Editor will consider the referees' comments and ascertain whether the revised manuscript is suitable for publication, s/he will then advise the Editor-in-Chief (or the Deputy Editor) to accept or reject the manuscript.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Immunity & Ageing, a personalized section of the site.

Reprints

High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints.

Supplements

Immunity & Ageing will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. All full length articles (proceedings, reviews or research articles) are indexed by PubMed. PubMed displays the title of the supplement only in the case of meeting abstract collections. For further information, please contact us.

Editorial policies

Citing articles in Immunity & Ageing

Articles in Immunity & Ageing should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Why publish your article in Immunity & Ageing?

High visibility

Immunity & Ageing's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.

Speed of publication

Immunity & Ageing offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files).
Articles will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Immunity & Ageing, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in Immunity & Ageing gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Immunity & Ageing are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Immunity & Ageing's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in Immunity & Ageing may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Immunity & Ageing. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Copyright

Authors of articles published in Immunity & Ageing retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the BioMed Central copyright policy and license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.